Everyone who loves the church knows something's gone wrong. The neat packages and clear answers that made Christians so confident in earlier decades have become complex and confused. Those old enough to remember the church life of the 50s and 60s practice selective memory and have nostalgia for the way things used to be. I say selective memory because that was a world in which many kinds of violence quietly disguised themselves as security and stability. Younger Christians have never had the experience of that illusory and triumphant age, so they wonder at the inability of their seniors to exorcise the spirit of those times and the customs of the church of those years.

Perhaps it is appropriate that this book bridges that generation gap—a son who loves the church dedicates his work to his father, who served the church in that older generation. And it is to the paradigmatic shift dramatized by the mind-blowing changes surfacing as these generations change that Robert Nash, Jr., addresses himself, opening doors for us to greet the possibilities of the future with hope, not dread.

Who in todays church has not sometimes wondered why something just doesn't feel right about how we are doing church these days. Some of us have even found ourselves saying to ourselves in self-doubt, "Am I crazy or what?" Some of what we seem to be doing in church feels like play-acting, but everybody else seems to take it all very seriously.

I am one who loves the church perhaps too much; and I am too eager to forgive its shortcomings because it means so much to me. It has nurtured and fed me in spite of its faults. Like Nash, I struggle 1 to make sense out of the changes that seem to sweep over our culture and threaten to make many things we do obsolete. Like Nash, I am convinced that what is going on is more than that some folks in the church have messed up. I am not of the opinion that we are likely to get very far trying to blame it all on some complex plot by people who have different positions on theology or politics or whatever. Many people in the churches are using up a lot of energy doing just that.

Nash is helpful to us in exploring the painful cultural divide we straddle between a world he describes as the modern world and the world emerging around us, the postmodern world. 2 He clarifies for us how it is that very change is shifting the ground under our feet, making obsolete the practices of yesterday, making obsolete even some of the institutional structures and the ways we have articulated the deepest things of our faith. It is not that those deep things of the faith have changed. Rather, the structures in which we housed them and the thought-forms with which we explained them have grown archaic. New language and new structures will be needed for gospel truth to be articulated in this world of post-modernity.

Our difficulty in responding to the need to change comes from our love of the familiar and our desire to protect valued practices and structures from the past. But even more, we resist the changes needed because we feel real threat in the ones we see coming down the pike. We are not as confident as we were a few decades ago when all the signs were optimistic.

Church leaders could once reassure us that we were on the right path because of the markers of succss that surrounded what we did. Membership growth burgeoned everywhere. Our congregations built bigger and bigger sanctuaries and education buildings. Fate seemed to smile on us. The lack of those signs of succss today has made us uncomfortable, unsure of ourselves. At one moment we want to try the old, familiar ways just a little harder to see if we can make it work once again. At the next moment we look for somebody to blame because it wont work.

One of the greatest strengths of this book is the new perspective it brings to the culture wars between traditionalists and progressivists. No battle has been more damaging to persons in the churches. It is a battle that has led to deep enmities and painful conflicts. Nash is sensitive in depicting the warring sides, but he helps us see that neither of them fully responds to the challenge before the churches now. The culture war between traditionalists and progressivists is a war using the tools and ideas of the modern world when we need ways of understanding one another in the postmodern world.

I appreciate the clues Nash gives about how to frame the new questions so we can get beyond whaling each other over the heads with the battle axes we used in ancient wars. He helps us see that both progressive and traditional Christians are called to go deeper and farther than their party positions have led them so far.

Nash also helps us see that the lack of success in member growth and money and institutional aggrandizement that makes us anxious is rooted not in our stupidity or error, but in deep changes in the culture around us and how it is shaped. He gives us clues about how to engage that culture in ways that are drawn from our roots in the biblical story and heritage.

This book goes far beyond its helpful analysis of cultural change. It opens up for us two major arenas that touch the heart of the churchs work in this new era. First, the immense hunger for authentic spirituality is a mark of our times. Where previous generations flaunted a narrow secular veneer, the people of the postmodern world seem drawn irresistibly to find sources of meaning and transcendance. Nash may be right that we are in or on the edge of a period as rich as the Great Awakening. He sees, as all of us do, masses of inchoate signs of hunger for the spiritually authentic behind the attraction to any kind of group or fad that touches otherworldly dimensions.

Yet this hunger for spirituality does not today, perhaps for the first time in many centuries, cause people to come to the churches. Somehow by the way churches are articulating their message and living it out, they are not communicating that authentic spirtuality is to be found there. If Nash is right, that we live in the midst of a time of genuine spiritual search analogous to the Great Awakening, how do we communicate the riches of our spiritual heritage to a generation not interested in being in communication with what churches do? I think Nash is calling us to be a church whose life is transparent to spiritual power and consequently magnetic for those who seek genuine spirituality.

That is the depth of the challenge Nash leads us into. The ways we have been doing our thing have left us out of touch with the very people for whom we hold this treasure of spiritual riches. Questioning, searching people look to the church and do not see spiritual authenticity. The call, then, that I hear Nash helping with is the call to understand the questioning character of our culture and to reframe the ancient message of the gospel so that it can be seen and experienced in the thought-forms of the postmodern culture.

As Nash opens our eyes to the spiritual awakening going on around us, he also lifts up the intense and far-flung desire of the people of today to make a difference. We who are Christians cannot think about such a statement without articulating it as the calling of almighty God to each of Gods children, a call to give themselves to others, to become servants. The desire to make a difference is a reflection of ones vocation to follow the way of Christ.

Nash offers us, then, a challening future for the church: that it would learn to live in the postmodern world and to be unafraid of its challenges, that it open itself to new ways to experience and articulate the timeless truth of the gospel, and that it have the courage to let go of structures of the past, trusting the Lord to lead us to the structures we will need for our ministry in the future.

This book encourages and calls me as I hope it does you. It speaks of the weariness many of us have felt, from time to time, knowing that we have spent years and years bailing out of a boat, fearing that it was sinking. The work, seen that way, is depressing. This book is a call to a new sense of what we are about. I think Nash wants and offers more of a challenge to us. I think he believes we are called to walk on water. And. . . I believe hes right. What's more, with God, I trust that we shall.